Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/601

Rh of St. Benedict, published in 1700, a renewal of the declaration that the salt statue must be a "perpetual memorial."

But it was soon evident that the scientific current was still working beneath this ponderous mass of theological authority. A typical evidence of this we find in 1666 in the travels of Doubdan, a canon of St. Denis. As to the Dead Sea, he says that he saw no smoke, no clouds, and no "black, sticky water"; as to the statue of Lot's wife, he says, "The moderns do not believe so easily that she has lasted so long"; then, as if alarmed at his own boldness, he concedes that the sea may be black and sticky in the middle; and from Lot's wife he escapes under cover of some pious generalities. Four years later another French ecclesiastic, Jacques Goujon, referring in his published travels to the legend of the salt pillar, says: "People may believe these stories as much as they choose; I did not see it, nor did I go there." So, too, in 1697, Morison, a dignitary of the French church, having traveled in Palestine, confesses that, as to the story of the pillar of salt, he has difficulty in believing it.

The same current is observed working still more strongly in the travels of the Rev. Henry Maundrell, an English chaplain at Aleppo, who traveled through Palestine during the same year. He pours contempt over the legends of the Dead Sea in general: as to the story that birds could not fly over it, he says that he saw them flying there; as to the utter absence of life in the sea, he saw small shells in it; he sees no traces of any buried cities; and, as to the stories regarding the statue of Lot's wife and the proposal to visit it, he says, "Nor could we give faith enough to these reports to induce us to go on such an errand."

The influence of the Baconian philosophy on his mind is very clear; for, in expressing hi? disbelief in the Dead Sea apples, with their contents of ashes, he says that he saw none, and he cites Lord Bacon in support of skepticism on this and similar points.

But the strongest effect of this growing skepticism is seen near the end of that century, when the eminent Dutch commentator Clericus published his commentary on the Pentateuch and his "Dissertation on the Statue of Salt."

At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot's wife and the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that "the whole story is due to the vanity of some and the credulity of more."

In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find new tributaries to this rivulet of scientific thought. In 1701 Father Félix Beaugrand dismisses the Dead Sea legends and the salt statue very curtly and dryly—expressing not his belief in it, but a conventional wish to believe.